Bankless - ROLLUP: Biden’s Crypto Executive Order | Sanctions & Commodities | Coinbase & MetaMask | Bear Watch?!

Starting point is 00:00:00 I thought we agreed during the break we'd stop saying the B word, David. We can't. Bull or bear? That's true. Not bull, not bear, but bankless. Hey, Bankless Nation, happy second week of March. David. What time is it?

Starting point is 00:00:16 Oh, it's the Friday Bankless Weekly roll-up time where we cover the entire week in crypto. This week, not actually as crazy as all the other weeks. There are some very big headlines and not too much more other than that. So definitely a week of some big news headlines. but a few, just concentrated news this week. Concentrated news. This one's coming at you one day early. We've got some things scheduled. So we're getting this to you a day early. So I guess maybe that's our treat. But some topics of the week for you. Number one, the Biden executive order for crypto just came down the pipeline. This is much anticipated. Yeah, I mean, there was a ton of fun about this. And we're going to answer the question whether this is actually bearish for crypto as many anticipated, or is it?

Starting point is 00:01:02 bullish. We'll talk about that. The question, Ryan, was, oof, question mark. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And it's still a question mark. That's why you have to tune into the episode. Also, commodity prices. We've got to talk about that. We talked to a little bit about that earlier in the week, but getting crazy out there, maybe threatening a global recession. That's happening. Update on Sanction Week. More sanctions. People freezing everyone's bank account. Coinbase. The Exchange. We'll talk about what they're doing in the sanctions world. Also, Metamask and Infura? Are they sanctioning people too?

Starting point is 00:01:34 What's going on there? Oof. David, you got the last one. There's some things going on in the NFT space. How would you characterize those things? Oh, I would definitely characterize them as complete shenanigans, right? Not just one shenanigan story, but multiple NFT shenanigans stories. So definitely deserves an oof there as well.

Starting point is 00:01:51 NFT shenanigans. Guys, before we dig in, we want to tell you a little bit about our friends at Opelis. Okay, they sponsored this message. they wanted us to tell you about what they are doing for the self-sovereign worker. And this is for U.S. listeners, primarily, because for U.S. listeners, it's very difficult to get health insurance if you're not working for a large corporation. Like, how do you do it? If you want to work for a Dow, if you want to work for yourself, if you want to work for a community,

Starting point is 00:02:20 how do you actually get health insurance? We can get that through Opolis. They offer health insurance and other payroll benefits to the self-sovereign worker. is the 21st century worker. The worker who's working for a set of Dow's working for themselves, is somewhat independent. They also provide the ability to get paid in crypto. They take care of all the pay stubs, all the paperwork, all the W2 sorts of things so that you don't have to. It's a really awesome tool, and I think is going to empower a whole new generation of Dow workers and crypto workers and ultimately get more people onboarded to Web3. And there's also a bonus. Tell me

Starting point is 00:02:58 about that bonus, David, if they sign up for Ophopoulos. now. Yeah, if you sign up for Ophilis and go through the onboarding process, you can get a thousand work tokens and a thousand bank tokens, so long as you do that before May 1st, which is a couple months away, but it's going to come fast. So go ahead and click that link in the show notes to get your bank and work tokens. Work tokens being the tokens of Opolis, which is a Dow. Awesome. Dows helping Dau's. That's what we're doing here. Is Bitcoin helping us? Is Bitcoin helping us? Is Bitcoin helping us? Confused market. I think I would call it a confused market this week, start of the week at $44,000 Bitcoin price, hit a low of below $38,000, but has since climbed

Starting point is 00:03:36 back up to just above $42,000 to where it is right now at $42,200. Overall, down 5-ish percent on the week. Yeah. This is hopeful, though, this little spike? Is that a spike on the Biden news? But I mean, you want to zoom out, though, Ryan, and see what it looks like? Okay, fine, if you make me, 30 days? Yeah, do the 180 days.

Starting point is 00:03:57 90 days, 180? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're heading down. Okay. All right. But look at this line. It's going to 24 hours. Look at this. Okay. It looks like we're actually up.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Here's a report from CNBC. 8%. Bitcoin up 8% as Biden announces executive order on cryptocurrencies. We're going to talk in depth about that when we get to the news section. But it seems like the market is interpreting that as not bearish anyway. Positive news? All right. A silver lining? Yeah, we're going to have to unpack that.

Starting point is 00:04:32 There's definitely some optimism to be had about this executive order. You know what? I could tell, David, you're feeling bearish, aren't you? Yeah, I'm a bear in a bear mood. I'm in a bare mood. You're never in a bare mood. What happened? What changed?

Starting point is 00:04:47 We'll get to the commodity section. Ether started the week at $3,000, hit a low of $2,450, and is currently at $2,720 down about 8% on the week. week. ETH down 8% on the week. Chris Berninski, I saw how to take on that. But that's actually to do with the ratio. Let's talk about the ratio first. ETH the Bitcoin ratio. That's down on the week too. What's happening here? Yeah, we broke down below 0.065. We are at 0.0644. I think we're at 0.067 last week. So the Eith-Btc ratio took a big hit, down 3%. The Bitcoin news, the executive order out of Biden, where Bitcoin jumped 8%. Ether did.

Starting point is 00:05:30 follow suit. So Bitcoin responded more than the rest of the crypto market on the executive order news, which is interesting. So Bitcoin up more than ETH. We're back to where we were in February, which was sort of a local low... Below where we were in February. We're now below where we were in February. Wow. We're going back to where we were in, what's this, October? October. Yeah. And this bodes interesting things. I think we've said on bankless before when Eith Bitcoin ratio is going up, that means secular bull market. That means risk on. Risk on.

Starting point is 00:06:05 This is what Chris Berninski says as well. Why don't you read out this tweet, David? Yeah, Chris says, Bulls are celebrating Bitcoin ripping on the executive order news. Meanwhile, while the ETH BTC ratio, which is a proxy for risk, appetite, and crypto grinds lower. So this is mixed signals, right? BTC up on the executive order news, but ETHBTC, which, as we've said before, is kind of a bull market indicator is hitting new lows that

Starting point is 00:06:34 we haven't seen since October, which is one of the few things, one of the many things that has caused me to not have my bull hat on this week. Okay. Well, I get to be a bit more bullish than David Hoffman this week. So I know Chris has been bearish the last few weeks and months, I would say. And I do agree with this ETH Bitcoin ratio being a proxy for. risk appetite in crypto. But doesn't ETH or doesn't Bitcoin generally have to go up first when we're breaking out of these bare market patterns? Like generally that's been the pattern. Bitcoin has a

Starting point is 00:07:09 breakout. Everyone's like, okay, is it safe? Is it safe? Weeks go by. Sometimes months go by. And then other assets follow suit. ETH generally next in kind of the classic cycle that we've seen again and again. Could that be what's happening here, David? That's definitely been the meme historically, but I don't think we've seen that been a thing for the past, like, six months or so. I think a lot of just, like, we are in uncharted waters, and I think we have been for a while now. Crypto is in a place, both in its development and in its global relevancy and in the regulation spotlight, both very good and very bad

Starting point is 00:07:49 and just, like, a lot of neutral stuff that is relevant to the crypto markets that really just changes, I think, like, all of our, like, previous models and patterns like oh first we would have bitcoin season then we would have eith season then we would have altcoin season when's the last time that that happened ryan i think it was over a year ago i would say i would say the last time that probably happened was like um a year ago it kind of started and we had a good after defy summer we had a nice strong bitcoin rally price rally and then we cycled into uh eith and then it kind of skipped defy and then we got like yeah straight to all l ones and then that like trailed off and now here we are.

Starting point is 00:08:30 So, but you think it's different. And I think probably the reason you think that is maybe because of the macro conditions, which we'll get to you in a few minutes with the commodity prices. But before we do, bankless bed index. That's a third, a third, a third. Bitcoin, Eth and DFI. What are we looking at on the week? It's about flat on the week.

Starting point is 00:08:47 Start of the week at about $100. It's currently at $99. So flat. Flat on the week. A way to get out some of that volatility from holding one of those asset classes, individually. All right. Let's get to a few other things on the bear watch,

Starting point is 00:09:02 bear market watch. This is the second worst start of the year for U.S. equities in 123 years. That's the tweet. Good place to start the bear watch is in the equities market. We generally don't talk about equities, but look at this. For context, the negative 11.9% drop in the first 44,

Starting point is 00:09:26 trading days in 2022. That's what we've seen, is only rivaled by the 1920 Great Depression and the Great Financial Crisis. Those are the only two times something like this has happened in 2009, of course, when we had the financial crisis. And in 1920, when there was the 1920 Great Depression, right there. Right there. Yeah, okay, right here. 11.8%. We beat it by 0.1%. Yeah, but then we got the roaring 20s, David. Yeah. This is 1920. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:59 So, like, it's a little bit like one-and-half bear watch, but also is like, all right, did we already express all the bear? Is the bear already expressed? I don't know. Maybe, maybe perhaps. But, I mean, also it's a little bit of just like a timing thing, right? Like, we hit the highs in the stock market right at, like, December, January. And then, and then Putin invaded, like, you en masse his army.

Starting point is 00:10:22 We did a normal correction. Then a war happened. So, like, yeah, there's a little bit of just, like, timing bias on this one. But still, at the end of the day, down 12% is a big deal. Bad start to the year for all assets, including equities, including crypto, of course. This is the headline title from the Financial Times. War in Ukraine sparks a commodity crisis. Let's dig into that.

Starting point is 00:10:47 Let's dig into the commodity crisis a little bit more. Here is prices of various commodities. And I'm looking at the one year here. Is that the thing to look at? Yeah, I think for crude oil. It just shows that spike at the end of the year so clearly where, like, in April of 2021, we had $60 a barrel for oil. We are currently up above $120 a barrel.

Starting point is 00:11:09 So, like, oil has doubled in the last, like, six months. And we don't have this tweet ready, but Jim Bianco made a tweet where, like, every time that there's been a 50% increase in crude oil has triggered a recession. Like, the hit rate is 100% according to, according to, uh, according to, uh, Jim Bianco. And like you can also see this in other commodities too. Like gold, which I mean, I guess isn't really necessary for production, but still is an indication of just kind of people being spooked out of equities and fiat and other currencies.

Starting point is 00:11:40 Like gold is surging past $2,000. Zoom out to like the five year on that one, Ryan. Here's the five year on gold. Yeah. Yeah. Almost setting new highs, basically. We're back to COVID. Remember when it did a big run during a kind of early COVID days?

Starting point is 00:11:55 Right. Yeah, and then Bitcoin sucked all the air out of its, out of the, out of its sales. And then, of course, corn and wheat are up bigly as well. Corn and wheat setting basically new highs again. Yeah. And like that really matters because that's food prices, right? Corn and wheat is food prices. And it's not just like food prices going up like 20 to 25% at home, which is probably what it could happen if these prices sustained their higher levels.

Starting point is 00:12:25 but it also means just like perhaps famine for Africa because apparently some economists are saying like, yo, like so much of the African continent is dependent on Russia and Ukraine for wheat that they have to, are going to have to rethink where they're getting their wheat from because there's absolutely zero way that a cycle's worth of crops is coming out of Ukraine right now.

Starting point is 00:12:47 And specifically wheat because Ukraine produces a massive amount of wheat for the world. So commodity, prices are jumping. This is a commodity indexe from the Dow Jones as well, and I think we can see that if I can pull up the graph here. Get that graph to load, yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:05 I guess the graph, there it is. Yeah. So these are all commodities, right? And you can do, we're going all the way back from April 2021, but even with the five year, you can just see the commodities going from where it was like 500. This is an index, so these numbers are arbitrary. 500 where it was at 27, in July of 2017, to where it is now

Starting point is 00:13:25 what, $1,200. So, like, when commodities go up in price, over a doubling, over that four year, four or five year period. So, like,

Starting point is 00:13:33 four or five year period, that's, that's a very large time in crypto terms, but in commodity terms, in manufacturing terms, in production and food, and just the cost to produce things, the commodities of the world

Starting point is 00:13:45 have, like, over doubled in a four-year period. So, like, how, does that make, how many businesses are no longer viable because the cost of goods are higher? And so much of this run has come up in the last three months. And so if these high commodity prices stay sustained for a long amount of time,

Starting point is 00:14:05 it can cause significant disruption in so many businesses that need to consume commodities to produce their products. So this is part of like Bear Mode David right now. And some of these niche commodities as well, like things like neon gas, which is an ingredient for semiconductors, which price is on gas. Which is, are in everything. Right?

Starting point is 00:14:28 Including your coffee cup. Yeah, including my coffee cup. You know, and fertilizer for crops, apparently that's a product that Belarus has a commodity ingredient. Which is now sanctioned, a country that's now sanctioned, so we can't buy that anymore. Palladium. That's a key commodity for cars, I believe,

Starting point is 00:14:50 and other manufactured goods. like that. So it's just like a ton of different commodities. And we've never, we've never seen crypto during this sort of a, you know, macro backdrop. So is this what's giving you the bare market vibes? This is, this is a very big part of it. And I think the story really hangs on is that how much of this are traders just speculating that commodities are the trade right now and like forcing commodities up and how much of this is actually going to be sustained, broken supply chains, Eastern Europe disruption, cascading contagion domino effects

Starting point is 00:15:25 across the globe, or is this just a blip? Like, are we going to return to more, like, normal levels in a couple weeks? Or is this actually going to cause significant disruption? Because, like, if commodity prices are high right now, like, when lumber spiked, a lot of, like, at the beginning of COVID, when lumber spiked, like, construction was just, like, pause

Starting point is 00:15:44 and people waited for it to come back down. And then people just resumed business as normal as soon as just, like, the market's cleared. If it hadn't spiked, however, that would have caused significant disruption and construction. And so that's basically what I'm looking at right now is like, is this a spike? Is this just financial markets being financial markets? Or is these high commodity prices going to be sustained? And remember, at the end of the day, while there is a big difference between currency inflation and commodity price asset, like valuation increases, for the average

Starting point is 00:16:17 consumer, it doesn't really matter because it still makes your milk more expensive. or it still makes your construction more expensive or driving your car more expensive. How many individuals can stomach a 10 to 15% increase of the goods that they consume on a monthly basis? It starts to like raise the water, the threshold line as to like what is viable in the world? Do you know, do you remember that episode we did with Lynn Alden? I think that was like during the summer and we're like, Lynn, what should people hold during the 2020s? Because it's going to be a chaotic decade. And she was like, you should hold commodities. Like, hold commodities. She did say that. Very interesting that that's what's kind of coming through. When fiat is unstable,

Starting point is 00:16:57 when there's uncertainty in the world, commodity prices just shoot up. Not necessarily crypto commodities, though. Heath and Bitcoin as commodities, but they're digital. Consumable commodities. You can't, you know, fill up your stomach on eath gas, right? So it's a different type of commodity class that is not following suit here, but we'll get more into that a little bit later. I think the commodities story is something that we'll be talking about a lot over the next weeks to come, probably on the roll-ups as well, but we put out an episode with Kyla Scanlon on Fortress Russia and commodity prices as well, including the R-word recession we talked about. So go check that out.

Starting point is 00:17:36 It was published earlier in the week. We'll include a link in the show notes as well. Just a good episode to get a recap on everything that's going on in the world. something that is down, as far as commodity price, though, is ether block space, okay? Ether gas fees dropped to a six-month low. The decrease is likely related to a cooling off of the NFT market is the subtitle here. I've definitely noticed way prices down here lately. Is that some solace to you, David, bear market, David?

Starting point is 00:18:08 I mean, no. Like when Ethereum block space demand is low, that's an indication. of the bull market. It's not, I wouldn't say it's a predictive indication. It's a lagging indicator, but it's just like another signal that like things are just quiet in crypto land. And as we know, like, Kobe put out that article a while ago that was like basically everything in crypto hangs on attention, right? Like things only go up when people have attention on them. And what I'm seeing is that the crypto industry has less and less like attention on it, other than the regulators, which isn't like the best kind of attention that you want.

Starting point is 00:18:40 NFT attention going away is bad because that was what sustained a lot of the bull market. And that's actually kind of the graph that we have up next is like, we all know that the NFT search terms on Google, just like went Scott gangbusters during NFT summer. But like, how long can it be sustained? And right now we're back down to roughly September 2021 levels of NFT search volume. So over six months ago, I think. So so much of that blocks based demand for Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:19:10 and for other chains came from NFTs, and people are starting to care less and less and less about NFTs. Does this little graphic here in the search bar, does this remind you of 2017 at all? ICOs. It reminds me exactly like 2017. I'm just feeding into the bear market, David, this week. I'm less worried than David for bankless listeners,

Starting point is 00:19:32 but I do think that this could mark a turning point as well. I guess we'll just have to see. but you know what's uh if you if you don't laugh you're you're gonna cry you know um this is the gas price i saw this is a screenshot from somewhere outside of l.a and we're talking like seven dollars a gallon in the u.s for gas and contrast that with way free fees right so like real-life gas up yeah but eith gas price down um that's the world that we're living in right now i don't know give us a Give us a case to be hopeful, though. What do you think?

Starting point is 00:20:11 What's something that gives you some bull market vibes? Well, it's one of those, you, maybe if somebody of your preferred podcast is bearish, maybe that means that the bare things have already happened. And so there was a line that I heard, I can't remember where it was said, but like people, oh yeah, I was actually in Ray Dahlia's book, which Ryan got me on, where like, people will keep on buying Amazon stock at every single price level because it went up so much. Therefore, it's clearly a good buy, forgetting that like when you're buying it at the top, it's not a good buy. It's an expensive buy. And so perhaps this is just like the inversion of that.

Starting point is 00:20:52 Like if so much of this bear niche has already happened, maybe that means all these stuff is cheap and the bearish just has already manifested. However, the whole contagion crypto is, the commodity contagion thing still looms in the back of my head. Like, we really need that to not trigger a bunch of other breakdowns in other parts of the world. I do think it's funny that the only thing that really concerns me, at least in the short run in crypto, and the short to medium run, let's say, in crypto, is macro events.

Starting point is 00:21:24 Like, the fundamentals of everything else are just, like, so strong. Always happen. I mean, the, the ETH merge this year, right? Like, that's going to be, that's a massive catalyst. How can it not be? And yet if that happens, well, we're still in the slumps of the bear market, maybe, I mean, when you have good news during a bear market, it just, like, doesn't move price. And that's an indicator of the bear market.

Starting point is 00:21:48 So I think in the next, you know, three to six months, we'll actually see what type of market we're in for real, including when the merge happens and when that ships, what happens to the price of crypto? Will that be a positive catalyst, or will it just, like, fall flat? because that's a massive fundamental event that hasn't been priced in. Maybe it won't get priced in if we're in the backdrop of all of these macro events. We will have to see. I think that's exactly right.

Starting point is 00:22:14 And if you believe the Bitcoiners about like how the four-year crypto cycles that we've historically had are all triggered by the happening events, typically the happening happens during a bear market and only Bitcoiners would care. They were like, oh, happening, yay. But then the mainstream media is like, we don't really care about that. but then because of the supply issue reduction coming out of Bitcoin would get half, there would be miners selling less Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:22:37 on the secondary markets, and then slowly Bitcoin would start to creep up, and it would creep up for like a year straight, and then people would realize it, and then they would turn into a bull market. And so if you believe that the supply halvings out of Bitcoin triggered bull markets anywhere between like 12 to 24 months later, you would definitely expect that same thing

Starting point is 00:22:57 to happen to Ethereum during the merch, because it's three halenings, at once. And so like maybe a viable path forward is that like we are, we are in a bear market, as bare market David says that we are. And then the merge happens. And the mainstream media just doesn't care about Ethereum. They forgot about crypto. No one's paying attention. It's quiet. And so the merge happens. We get a small little blip in price, but it doesn't, nothing really happens. But then for the next like 12 to 18 months, ETH just slowly just grinds up and grinds up and grinds up because of the supply issuance reduction.

Starting point is 00:23:31 Like this isn't something, these are patterns that we've seen before that I could totally see playing out. If we are in the bare market, though, like let's say this repeats similar, like a fractal of 2018 and 2019, there's some like periods where things stay steady and then there's like a series of drops.

Starting point is 00:23:50 Yes. You get a 50% drop. And you're like, okay, that was it. That was the 50. And then you get another 50% drop, right? And you're like, oh my God, okay, that was it. And then you get another 50% drop. That's one of the things that's got me into bear market mode.

Starting point is 00:24:02 It's just like every time these crypto prices come up to an inflection point, it always goes down. Like you can predict it. It's like, well, if we're in a bear market, it's going to go down and then it goes down. Yeah. I, you know, it's, I think it's a different orientation, certainly, looking at how to investering the, you know, the bare market. But, I mean, the thing that remains true is like, don't sell when the market is panicking, right? That's the absolute worst time to sell. And so you can either hold through these types of things.

Starting point is 00:24:31 You can have some dry powder on reserve to buy aggressively the dips that could happen. Or this could be sort of a fake out of some sort. And we're not repeating 2018, 2019, given the strong fundamentals. So impossible to tell. But I've noticed that the super cycle believers have been quiet recently. Well, the thing is, like, I bet you if we, like, zoom to all-time highs in, like, three to four months, people will be like, oh, super cycle. It's like narrative follows price, guys, all right?

Starting point is 00:25:03 Not the other way around. That's exactly right. Anyway, we got a lot more to talk about. We're going to cover the releases. We're going to hit the news of the week in clothing, including that Biden executive order. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure.

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Starting point is 00:27:14 and allows me to make limit on-chain orders. So you can set and forget your D-Fi trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. So when you're making a trade, head over to macha.xyz slash bankless and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Hey guys, we are back with the news of the week. Now we got the bearishness out of the way. Let's talk about what's getting released. I said news of the week, but first we got to cover what's getting released. Starknet. That's some good news this year. Okay, layer two is coming. Layer 2 is here. This is a Starknet hyphen ecosystem.com website. Look at all these projects on Starknet. or either live or on the roadmap in beta version of some sort, Alpha Road, Argent X, bitmap box, brick, D-YD-X, of course, is already there, dope wars, it's a cool game,

Starting point is 00:28:05 Diversify, we know Diversify, they're, immutable X, the ecosystem is getting larger and larger, so I expect this website to fill up with tiles. What do you think about this? Oh, I think on the other side of the bear market, Ryan, we're going to come out with five-cent, five cent transactions and instant finality, and everyone's going to be like, oh, Ethereum Solved to scalability problems during the bear market. It's going to be great. Sorry, we're supposed to leave the bear market behind. David's recovered, though. That's that's bull market David talking. It just might take a few months. Let's talk about this, too. The tally wallet. What are

Starting point is 00:28:36 they up to? Yeah, Talley wallet. That's a new metamass competitor now has the swap feature ingrained into the tally wallet. Inside the tally wallet, all the fees go into the community multi-sig. and they have apparently half the cost of a metamask swap fee. And then they finish up the tweet saying, you'll want to give this a try before the Dow launches. Dot, dot, dot, dot. I wonder what that means. Ryan, what do you think that means?

Starting point is 00:29:03 You'll want to give this a try before the Dow launches. Hmm. I don't know what hint they're dropping here, Dave. What do you need to launch a Dow? Huh. There's literally only one thing that you. need to. Does it start with a tea? It does start with a tea and it's not tally. Okay. We'll let bankless listeners derive what this tweet could mean for themselves, but hopefully you can read between

Starting point is 00:29:27 the lines there a little bit. I will say that when you advertise the smear shmop that's coming, it generally becomes crowded. It definitely becomes a crowded thing. So why not? Why not say it? Everyone knows everyone else is going to do it as soon as they can as soon as it makes sense. So why not? Just hint the smear shmob. This is cool. This is not something that's being hinted at from our friends at Ledger. They wanted us to let you know that there's a new ledger device that's out. This is Ledger the hardware wallet. I don't have one of these yet, but I want one. The reason I don't have it is because it just came out. This is the Ledger Nano S plus. So, maybe you have a ledger nano s you probably do maybe you have the other version of of ledgers as well

Starting point is 00:30:21 ledger nano x the ledger nano s plus is a new ledger device that has just been released bigger screen more memory more stuff you can do on the wallet side of things including when you plug it into ledger's software the ability to manage your nfts send and sign your nfts with full transparency in Ledger Live. So this is like taking the ledger that everyone knows and loves and probably already has and like upgrading it, making it better. Yeah, so this is like for the right mental model I think for this is like this is the new shiny iPhone SE is what the Ledger S is.

Starting point is 00:31:04 It's like the more affordable version of Ledger. The other one being the Ledger X, which is kind of like the iPhone Pro. But this has gotten a big upgrade to kind of look like the. the ledger X, which I have. I also, I have both the old Ledger S and the current Ledger X. I thoroughly enjoy the Ledger X, but it's looking like the Ledger S is getting the glow up to look a little bit more like the Ledger X,

Starting point is 00:31:28 but also being a little bit more affordable, just clocking in at $80 for one of these things. Yeah, it's super cheap for a new product like this. So go check that out. I think these aren't going to last long. Like Ledger has had some... They always sell out, yeah. Yeah, they always sell out.

Starting point is 00:31:42 And their, you know, supply chain is difficult. Yeah. Another reason to be bearish. Stop, okay? Just get your ledger. That's what you should do. There's a link in the show notes. Get a ledger nano Splus. Go try that out. Let us know what you think of it. Immutable. They just raised $200 million. Now immutable the company is valued at $2.5 billion. Of course, folks that have been listening to Bankless know what immutable is. It's a layer two solution, particularly for NFTs. What's the significance of the? this raised, David. Yeah, so this is not too long ago, a Mutable announced a partnership with GameStop and had the GameStop like development fund.

Starting point is 00:32:21 And people got really excited about that, but then they got disappointed and they did in the fact that this fund the funds from this came from a sale of IMX. This is not that. This is not the token. This is the company itself, I believe, that has raised 200 million in Series C

Starting point is 00:32:37 funding. Yeah. And so valued at 2.5 billion, which is distinct, although related to the 3.2 fully diluted valuation of the IMX token currently. But this is all going to go into building games and the gaming ecosystem on top of immutable X. More layer to dry powder. This is cool to Wallet Connect.

Starting point is 00:32:56 Just announced they've raised a little bit of money, $11 million worth. What's Wallet Connect, David? Yeah, Wall Connect is a nice way. I use it to connect some of my mobile wallets to whatever I'm doing on desktop. So Argent particularly, if I want to use anything with my Argent wallet,

Starting point is 00:33:10 but use a desktop app like Uniswap or compound or whatever. You can scan a QR code using your mobile wallet, using Wallet Connect. And the QR code will link your Wallet Connect wallet on your mobile phone to whatever app you're using on desktop. So it's a nice hybrid mobile desktop connectivity feature. And actually just really useful and fantastic UX. And they've raised $11 million to help grow out Wallet Connect. So congrats to the Wallet Connect team. Yeah, you know what's really cool is I remember Wallet Connect back in like 2018, 2019 when like there was very little funding in crypto. And it was it was kind of thought of as a as a public good with no like no funding, no real business model. And like not really a strong way forward from a revenue

Starting point is 00:33:54 perspective. Now here they are in 2022 getting $11 million in funding. My have things how things have changed. And I think that's because like tokens have changed things. Right. So now that there is there is a way to monetize a public good. We've seen this with ENS previously. which didn't really seem to have a good monetization strategy back in 2018, 2019. We're seeing this with Wallet Connect. We're seeing this with all sorts of projects. So it's very cool to see good public goods-esque projects get funded in the way that they're getting funded now. Yeah, I think people that consider publicly accessible tokens on decentralized exchanges close enough to public goods.

Starting point is 00:34:36 So count it. Yeah, yeah. Bain Capital, Ventures, they just launched a crypto-focused fund, now with 500. $160 million. Bank capital, of course, is like a fairly famous private equities firm, I believe. And, you know, there are 38-year-old firms. This is kind of older money PE now joining the crypto fray. Any thoughts here?

Starting point is 00:34:57 Well, that's good timing to be raising $560 million because you're going into a bare market, right? It is a good time to raise. It is a good time to raise. Just don't buy. Just buy the dip, guys. My advice for bank capital. We'll see what they do with their money. All right.

Starting point is 00:35:11 Who's this? diagonal finance. They're excited, they say, to announce that they have raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round. What are they going to do? They're going to enable crypto-native subscriptions on Ethereum. What's that mean? Yeah. So this is using the super fluid streaming payments protocol. Really? Yeah. So this is a startup built on top of a startup. So that's already pretty cool. And so this is rather than just, I don't know, however you would normally do subscriptions with crypto, I don't even think that you could. There's not really a, way. There's not really a way. With superfluid, you can stream like micro-transactions your subscription.

Starting point is 00:35:47 So like, I don't know, you pay for Netflix like one penny at a second or whatever the right math is. How about a bankless premium membership? Something like that too. That would work too. And obviously, you aren't paying gas fees for this. That's kind of the work around that superfluid offers. So on-chain subscriptions. Now a thing coming out of diagonal. subscriptions in 2022 were $7.3 trillion. So that's a fairly significant market to capture if Diagnol can do this. David, A16Z, they're added again. They've just invested in Lido finance.

Starting point is 00:36:20 How much they put in here? $70 million into Lido. So this has to be a discounted token vested lockup investment out of Lido. So probably a discounted valuation on the Lido token going into A16Z, probably locked out for a number of years. Good investment in proof of stake A16 Z is getting, speaking of good investments, one of the best investments you can make is getting a career in Web 3. Join crypto. Get a job in crypto, as we say every week. If you can get a job during the bear market, you're going to thrive during the bull market. That's the pitch. I thought we agreed during the break we'd stop saying

Starting point is 00:37:02 the B word, David. We can't. or bear. True. Not bull, not bear, but bankless, okay? Because bankless is featuring an editor. That's the number one job. Do you know that? Do you know we're hiring an editor for the bankless newsletter?

Starting point is 00:37:17 Who put that number one? It seems like a great job. I'm going to hold on this. Look, bankless fantastic newsletter read by over 150,000 crypto natives. Actually, more than that. I don't know who wrote that. It's old news, okay? We're at 175,000 now.

Starting point is 00:37:31 Anyway, we're looking for an editor. If you can write, if you've got some script, skills in the crypto space. If you're a bankless consumer, go ahead and apply for that job. Let's talk about a few more of the jobs on the jobs board. I lost it. Here it is. A senior product manager at the Bankless Academy. I guess, wow, is this Bankless Dow? Hey, we're hiring for bankless stuff. Wow, Bankless is hiring across the board, both Dow and HQ. A senior product manager is super rare. What an awesome job that would be an NFT company. A senior technical product manager at runtime verification ahead of marketing at status. I am and operations manager at maker

Starting point is 00:38:07 Dow lead financial analyst strategic finance at maker Dow. Deep Dow's hiring, Prima's hiring, tally's hiring, novels hiring. I could go on. There's a lot more at the bankless jobs website. Go ahead and check that out, guys, and get a job during the B market. That's a great way to put it. Listeners can hear whatever they want to hear. News time. All right, news time. Let's start here. This was a crazy story that I read. This is, I guess, is the Ukraine thread, but it sort of read like a crypto-dispopian novel a little bit.

Starting point is 00:38:44 A little bit, yeah. Ukraine is buying bulletproof vests and night vision goggles using crypto. That's what they're buying. I mean, it's better than like AK-47s and missiles, I think. That would be a lot more contentious. Bulletproof vests, night vision goggles are, I mean, one's to protect you, One is definitely to help kill other people. But again, this is what we talked about last week on the roll-up.

Starting point is 00:39:07 Like, when you donate your crypto assets to the Ukrainian government, they can go buy bombs with it. And it's not just that. It's the military suppliers themselves. They are now spinning up crypto accounts so they can accept crypto. Oof, that deserves an oof. That's an oof. Right? Look at this, man.

Starting point is 00:39:23 This just reads like a dystopia novel, like Worlds at War. And now people are using crypto to, like, buy military gear in order to protect themselves. in order to like... Permissionless payments for military gear is a scary sentence. Right. That's the world of 2022. I guess on the flip side of this, the happy side of this, this is a summary of all of the inflows that went to Ukraine and for various things,

Starting point is 00:39:50 many different things. But look at the top line here. EF donations, $18 million. That was, that beat out Bitcoin. Bitcoin is $10 million. And the rest, I think it's over $55. million dollars or something like this. The rest were in ERC20s.

Starting point is 00:40:05 There's some dot donations as well. But what's interesting about this is ETH was now the money, not Bitcoin. Heath was the main money provided to Ukraine. Something we've been saying for a while is ETH is money. It looks like it here. Yeah. And my bias is definitely going to come out on this one. But like the Ethereum community generally a little bit more altruist, I would say,

Starting point is 00:40:29 than the hardcore conservative nature of Bitcoiners. And Ethereum community showed up more than Bitcoin did. It's important to note that not only did $10 million out of the Bitcoin came and got sent to Ukraine, $18 million out of Ethereum. But the Bitcoin market cap is like two and a half times the size of Ethereum's market cap, which means the total wealth held by Bitcoiners is two and a half times the total wealth held by people that hold ETH. and ETH donations almost doubled Bitcoin donations. So the Ethereum community, I think much more tapped in to the global world that's going on and where needs need to be met. Heath is still definitely underrated as a money in the way that Bitcoin is rated as a money.

Starting point is 00:41:14 Okay, so this is the story in Ukraine. Ukrainian deputy minister just reiterates a call for crypto exchanges to block Russian users. And you can kind of get in their headspace. They're just doing whatever they can to survive. and they're calling on the rest of the world to just do whatever they can to sanction Russia in all various ways. But I don't know if we should always be listening to them. It's kind of the same reason we don't have the victims of a crime as jurors in a court case, right? They're too entrenched in the problem to actually provide a less, a more objective, a cool-headed response to this.

Starting point is 00:41:55 and this is sort of what they're saying. So they want all crypto exchanges to just block all Russian users. That's the message that's coming out of Ukraine right now. Yeah. And how helpful is that really? Like the Russian individuals of the world who I think, I mean, we can feel pretty damn certain that Ukraine does not have a Coinbase account or a Cracken account or any of the other oligarchs. They're too easy to find.

Starting point is 00:42:19 But that leaves like the Russian citizens, the Russian users of these crypto accounts. And like how is freezing their... account's going to help anything. Like bombs are still going to drop on Ukraine, even if you freeze Russian users out of their Coinbase account. So this one, as much as I stand with the people of Ukraine and want the war around Ukraine to end as soon as possible, I don't see this one moving the needle. Elizabeth Warren, related to this, just crafted a bill that targets cryptocurrency exchanges in Russia sanctions. So she's worried. I think some lawmakers are particularly Elizabeth Warren, that cryptocurrency might be used to sidestep existing sanctions.

Starting point is 00:43:00 There are few interesting quotes in this article. Senator Lindsay Graham says, cryptocurrency is rearing its ugly head here. As you sanction the Russian Central Bank, which is a good thing, I worry about how the cryptocurrency, the cryptocurrency, could be used by the Russians to stay afloat. That darned cryptocurrency? Some of the, I think the language in the bill, says the provision would make it easier to verify the identities of customers and transfers to private crypto wallets by requiring financial institutions that is like the exchanges of the world to keep

Starting point is 00:43:38 detailed records and submit reports to the Treasury Department. So basically they already, you know, a Coinbase or a Cracken or Gem, they already AML KYC everyone. Now Treasury wants a copy of all of the identities of all of the crypto wallets that they're AMLKYCing. Whereas before, you'd expect Coinbase to sort of have that information in their own private records in case they need it. Maybe there's a court order or some sort of reason to give it to authorities. But otherwise, they'd keep it private. Now, Treasury wants a direct data feed so that every time you deposit or withdraw from a crypto wallet,

Starting point is 00:44:17 Treasury knows whose wallet it is. So your address, your eth address is linked directly to your identity. that's what she's proposing. Yeah, they're asking all of the crypto exchanges to spin up their own IEF Saran directly connected to the meta IEF Saran, which is the central government. And so they're asking, it's like, hey, we do our job with financial surveillance. We want you guys to take equal parts in financial surveillance. That's what's going on here.

Starting point is 00:44:46 Remember we talked about last week that some of the exchanges were resisting some of this? In particular, they were resisting the... complete blocking of all Russian accounts on their platforms. And what we said at that time was like, I wonder how long that's going to last. Right. One week. Barely, right? Like, if even.

Starting point is 00:45:07 So what happened here, David? Coinbase will block Russian accounts to sanction the country. So they are just not trying to pick a fight at all during the subbacle. And they have indeed kicked off Russian users, frozen Russian users off of their accounts to comply with sanctions. And so I'm pretty sure this is true. But once again, crypto exchanges are not regulated in the same way as other financial institutions. And so this complying with sanctions, I'm pretty sure this is true, is optional.

Starting point is 00:45:40 Right. Like they are not, because they're not a bank, they don't have to comply with bank regulations. They're just doing it anyways because they don't want to piss off the I of Sauron. It's probably a good move. It's probably a good move. but they have indeed blocked access to sanctioned users. It's kind of like optional in air quotes, right? It's like when you get letters from the government,

Starting point is 00:46:01 how optional is it really? Brian Armstrong put together a threat about this. You want to read out some of these tweets? Yeah, the main tweet that I think is important to highlight is that tweet number five in this thread, we'll link it in the show notes. He says, that being said, we don't think that there's a high risk of Russian oligarchs

Starting point is 00:46:18 using crypto to avoid sanctioned because it's an open ledger, trying to sneak lots of money through crypto would be more traceable than using US dollars cash, art, gold, or other assets, which is what we have been saying for a long time. If you want to launder money, you shouldn't use crypto. It's a terrible vehicle for that because of the fact that it's an open public permissionless ledger. People like Lindsay Warren and... Lindsay Graham, you mean? Lindsay Graham and Elizabeth Warren, thank you.

Starting point is 00:46:45 I mean, same talking head, though. Totally different sides of the aisle, but somehow the same message. Exactly. Like when you go, just because when they go to EtherScan and they don't understand what the hell's going on, doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't. Like, it's a public ledger. You know everything. Just because they don't understand that, doesn't mean that crypto can therefore be used to violate sanctions.

Starting point is 00:47:06 So it's because they don't get it. I mean, can you blame the exchanges? Like, we knew this was going to happen. What else are they going to do? Like, are they going to really piss off the nation state? Is that a good idea? I mean, they can't, they can't afford to do this. This would cost them their entire business.

Starting point is 00:47:21 Obviously, that's what they're going to do. Obviously, that's what centralized entities do. This is the whole reason for defy. The whole reason for bank lists is so that we don't have a third party that can surveil us and be the eye of Soron and arbitrarily lock our accounts. This is why we need defy. What's this take here? It seems related.

Starting point is 00:47:39 It's not just Brian Armstrong saying this, but it seems to be like, you know, nation state authorities. saying that crypto is a poor conduit for Russian oligarchs. What's this about? This is from Hannah Lang. At the webinar this morning, the National Security Council Director of Cybersecurity, Carol House, says that the scale that Russia would need to circumvent all of financial sanctions, quote, would almost certainly render cryptocurrency as an ineffective primary tool for the state, which is what we said last week, which is what we said on the Monday opening note two weeks ago. Like, the market cap of

Starting point is 00:48:16 crypto is about true trillion dollars, and Russia and all the oligarchs have, like, a third of that that's being frozen. Like, you cannot fit a third of the crypto market cap through tornado cash or through, like, whatever tumbler you have. It doesn't work. And that's aside from how it's all public and permissionless and transparent. And so, the more and more consensus of buy people who know what they're talking about are all like, yeah, crypto wouldn't work for sanctions.

Starting point is 00:48:45 so why are we even having this conversation? What they're having this conversation is an excuse to tighten up the state surveillance on crypto. It's just a nice narrative in the headlines where you can start to get things through and pretend like the country supports it and pretend like it makes sense. Terrorism, child porn, Russian sanctions, these are all the same things. Great excuses to restrict freedoms. That's what's going on.

Starting point is 00:49:16 Let's talk a little bit about a new story we didn't get to last week because it was kind of breaking. We wanted to see what happened when it settled. But there were reports, I think last Thursday and Friday, that Metamask was actually blocking transactions, blocking individuals in Venezuela from putting Metamask transactions through in the wallet. That was not quite true. That's not quite what happened. Can you tell us what exactly happened? there was some arbitrary blocking, but it wasn't on the Metamast side. Where was it, David? Yeah, it was on the Infura side of things. And I believe it was Venezuela. It did have to do with a

Starting point is 00:49:53 geographic region, but it was not as a result of sanctions or not any pressure by any nation-state regulation. Apparently, it was just like a misconfiguration in Inferra. So basically like a whoopsies, a bug, an exploit, a glitch in Inferra. What's Inferra for people who don't know? Yeah, so when you send a transaction via Metamask, it gets relayed to an Ethereum node. All transactions all get relayed to an Ethereum node somewhere, somehow, some way. And Metamask defaults to Inferra. Inferra is a centralized node provider spun up by consensus. It's a consensus product. And so if you just need an Ethereum node, because you do, if you ever want to write a transaction or do anything else, you have to send it to an Ethereum node. And so Inferra offers that service. And when you download Metamask, it default. by pointing to Inferra. Infira was the thing that had the whoopsies in the configuration for Venezuelan countries. And so Venezuelans, when they wanted to use MetaMask, they went to METAMask, and then they got this warning saying that there is no node provider for you, basically,

Starting point is 00:50:57 and your transaction won't get through. Running, hooking up a node to Metamask that's different from the default one is not something that users typically do just because Inferro works so well, and we never have had any issues prior and we still really don't have any issues. But it's important to know that you can quickly and easily and trivially swap out in Fuera for any other Ethereum node. There's a website spun up by our friend David Mehow called Ethereumnodes.com, which just lists off a bunch of public companies or also communities that run nodes that you're welcome to hook into. So if one goes down, you can just pick up a different one or you can run your own node, which is also an option. And so

Starting point is 00:51:36 if the back end node provider for Metamask ever goes down, do know that you can go to Ethereumnose.com and just pick a different one. And it is, and which many, many Bitcoiners have not realized that, you know, no, like Ethereum does not have centralization risk around Inferra because there's an infinite number of alternatives. Anyways. Including running your own node. Including running your own node. Yeah, it's just a matter of changing the defaults. Although, you know, I will say it is important, increasingly important, that we, try to decentralize this data, like this data provider portion of Ethereum node infrastructure, right? Because it's also not super practical for everyone to run their own nodes, obviously.

Starting point is 00:52:20 And they're like, they're like BitTorrent like solutions to this. And there's some companies working on decentralized data providers that I think will be very helpful in the future. But yeah, it's a good PSA. It's something to know. But this is, is a link you included in the agenda, David. And I'm wondering if you could explain this. This is sort of Ethereum versus Bitcoin sanctions. And this is a document here. What is this document talking about, David, the difference between Bitcoin versus Ethereum sanctions? Yeah, so this is a document I put together when I heard on a podcast about how Bitcoiners were pointing at this event of infera being down for a certain parts of the country. And Bitcoiners were pointing at

Starting point is 00:53:04 Ethereum, like they always do, and they say, this is why Bitcoin is designed the way that it is. It's maximally simple. It's maximally, like, manageable. And there isn't any sort of just, like, no, like, risk like this. Like, Ethereum always centralized around Inferra. And so this podcast, the, the host just kind of regurgitated a bunch of Bitcoiner takes. And I was kind of, I messaged him. I said, yo, I'm kind of disappointed in your reporting because all of this stuff is just basically wrong. And so I put this document together. We'll put it in the show notes, which he asked me to put together as, like, statement as to like trying to like fix correct the record. And so I'll just share a few lines here. I say, uh, I say that Bitcoiners often see a few chinks in Ethereum's armor, how Metafut mask defaults to Infura, the larger state size of Ethereum's nodes, and then they extrapolate it into hyperbole and use this as a narrative as to why this simplicity of Bitcoin is good. But Bitcoin does not shine during times of nation state ire by not even making on-chain native financial applications possible, which is kind of where the need for Infurban.

Starting point is 00:54:04 comes from in the first place, Bitcoin waves the white flag of providing self-sovereign finance in a trustless way and gives it straight to the centralized institutions who are forced to bend the need to those that have monopoly on physical power. The absence of native defy on Bitcoin allows Bitcoiners to sneakly critique all of the Ethereum chinks in the armor that comes with actually taking the hard route of providing native defy. So here's my spicy take. This is akin to a Cheeto dust-fingered couch potato critiquing the landing of a pro sports like, you know, gymnast. Sure, they didn't stick the landing, but they did three backflips and a 720 twist. And so...

Starting point is 00:54:40 Well, armchair keyboard warrior sort of takes. Yeah. And so the last spicy line that I have is that Bitcoin shouldn't be getting props because it doesn't even try to offer defy. That's not a solution. That's a cop-out. And it's not a pro argument for Bitcoin just because it succeeds at not trying. And so, if you are a bitcoiner, who likes to fud Ethereum for having some sort of centralization risk around Inferra,

Starting point is 00:55:04 Read this and reconsider. David's talking about Bitcoin Maximilus. Yes. You know, in particular that like to charge. And here's the point, right? If all of your banking transactions have to take place on a centralized exchange, like a blockfi or a Celsius or a Coinbase or a Cracken, like how many orders of magnitude worse is that?

Starting point is 00:55:29 We just saw what Coinbase can do is can block an entire country, an entire class of citizens from accessing their crypto, right? And this is the need for defy and why I think Ethereum as well is like already ahead. Let's talk about this. I think this is the big story of the week, maybe. The Biden administration just put out an executive order. This was a long-awaited executive order. Like all the way months back when we were talking to Andrew Yang,

Starting point is 00:55:58 and I think he re-echoed this in that Yves Denver, the executive order was coming. A lot of people in crypto were terrified about this. They thought the executive order would be a Biden administration crackdown, a complete crackdown on crypto, a very hostile, you know, attempt to like kneecap crypto in the United States. But it was not that. No. Actually, maybe it was actually bullish. What was inside this thing? The fact that it wasn't just a massive failure of an executive order.

Starting point is 00:56:30 and then the fact that it actually looks like they were trying to do an intentional and well-researched job is like the bullish part of this. It's like, oh, they're not just being ridiculous nation status like Elizabeth Warren, and they're actually taking a well-reasoned approach to this. So that's what the market, I think, reacted to. Basically, Joe Biden said,

Starting point is 00:56:49 hey, let's spend some time, let's spend some resources and research the best way to regulate crypto. Oh, cool. Yeah, with a, with a, uh, measures on, focuses on six different areas. Consumer protection, obviously, financial stability, illicit activity, U.S. competitiveness, financial inclusion, and responsible innovation. Responsible innovation, the last one being like the thing that everyone in crypto is really, really happy about. So there's some things to talk about, but generally people in the crypto world are all pretty like happy with this executive

Starting point is 00:57:21 order. Look at three of these things. Actually, all of these things actually matter a lot. US competitiveness, thank you for considering that. Financial inclusion, that's important. something Web 3 can bring. Responsible innovation? Like, absolutely. Let's talk about the innovative side of crypto, rather than all of the kind of illicit activity side of things that people want to dwell on. It's fantastic to see this kind of language in a report.

Starting point is 00:57:45 And this is just a call for investigation into these areas. It's not a call for like some sort of decision right now or some sort of immediate action. It's a call for a decision after research. However, I will push back a little bit with what you said, Ryan, because there's two sections that kind of make little to no sense to me, but I think that if they do their research, they'll discover why. The illicit activity one, this is a statement from President Biden. The president has called for an unprecedented focus of coordinated action

Starting point is 00:58:15 from federal agencies in mitigating illicit finance and national security risks posed by cryptocurrencies. He is also urging international collaboration on this issue. We already know from chain analysis that very, very illicit. illegal transactions happens using crypto rails. Like less than 1% is like the latest figure that I got. So like I'm hoping that when they go and investigate the illicit activity being used by crypto rails, they did they discover like, oh, there's actually not a lot there. In this article, they cite the BitFinex hack, which we already, which we know about.

Starting point is 00:58:49 And then the trope of how like following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they're worried about how Russian individuals can use crypto, which again, we've already discussed. There's another one. Do you think this is like a good faith effort, though? I think, yes. I definitely think this is a good faith effort. Wow. Certainly. I did not expect a good faith effort. Right, right. Yeah. But, you know, I'm happy to be surprised. Another thing that came out is climate change. Biden also dropped a mention of the sheer energy

Starting point is 00:59:18 cost baked into digital currencies like Bitcoin. He wants the government to study ways to make crypto innovation more responsible, reducing any negative climate impacts. I think this is actually really hilarious. He wants the government to study ways to make crypto innovation more responsible. Oh, do you mean what the Ethereum researchers have been researching for the past six years with proof of stake? Like, don't worry, guys, we got this. We've been doing this for years now. Well, do you think, you know, a bunch of government people in the executive branch are now going to have to listen to bank lists and get like schooled up on what's going on here? Oh my God, are we going to be cited as a source in some sort of like federal statement?

Starting point is 00:59:57 God, I hope not, but maybe a bunch of new podcast listeners. That'd be kind of fun. So what are the takes from around the industry on this? Yeah, so Jeremy Aller and also Jerry Brito from Coin Center, Jerry Brito from Coin Center, Jeremy Aller from Circle the Stable Coin, put both some threads together that are linked in the show notes. So we will read out a few key tweets starting with number one. Jeremy says, White House Executive Order and U.S. government strategy for digital assets,

Starting point is 01:00:21 a thread with thoughts. TLDR. This is a watershed moment for crypto, digital assets, Web 3, akin to the 96-97 whole of the government wake up to the commercial internet. And then I'll skip to tweet 3. Specifically, the executive order calls for nearly every relevant federal agency to take an on understanding and developing policy positions that understand and address risks, but vitally that support innovation in U.S. national economic competitiveness. And then skipping to the last tweet. For those of us in the crypto community, in my opinion,

Starting point is 01:00:53 this executive order should be viewed as the single biggest opportunity to engage with policymakers on the issues that matter. The proverbial doors of policymakers are wide open. This is now a national conversation in the U.S. So, like, this is, the policy doors are wide open for the crypto industry to go through them and educate them, but also for the banking industry to come in and fud us. So, like, the board is set. The match is about to begin.

Starting point is 01:01:19 It's now us first, like, basically the banking industry to make sure that crypto is treated well. So those are the key tweets out of a, out of a, out of, Jeremy Alleyer from Circle. So here are two tweets from Jerry Brito out of Coin Center, Coin Center being basically our lobbying agency for the industry. Jerry Brito says, the message I take from this executive order is that the federal government sees cryptocurrency as a legitimate, serious, and important part of the economy and society. And I think it's a good signal to serious people who have been holding back from getting involved. The executive order also presents another

Starting point is 01:01:52 striking contrast with alarmist politicians and media in that it is ultimately a call for further study in deliberate planning, not a reactive rush to legislate or regulate. This is why we are happy. Bullish. Bullish. Yay. Yay. We like it. We like it. We like it. Bullish David's back on the back of an executive order, nonetheless. Things I wouldn't anticipate in 2022, more of them coming, I guess. That's awesome. That's really great. And I think our friend Jake Trevinsky maybe summed it up really well. I'm going to read out his tweet. Anyone worried that President Biden's executive order would spell doom and gloom for crypto can fully relax now. The main concern, yes, I feel relaxed. The main concern was that the executive order might force rushed rulemaking or imposed new and

Starting point is 01:02:40 bad restrictions. Exactly. That was my concern. But there's nothing like that here. It's about as good as we could ask for. Guys, you could fully relax now. That's not, do you have some relaxing music? I don't. That's it here. We, we need to be. Okay, but I got, I got. I got. I got. one for Elizabeth Warren though. Yeah. I'm relaxed. This is great. It's great news.

Starting point is 01:03:06 I'm really excited about this. Very happy. I guess that's all we have to say about it. Maybe we'll get some more content on this in the weeks to come. But it sounds like, as you said, the game and the pieces are now laid out and we just have to play our hand. There's nothing scary about this executive order. But we've got to hit the gas pedal.

Starting point is 01:03:27 and keep moving forward in DC. Yeah. Maybe actually relaxed is actually not the right way to put it because we still have to play the game. But the game appears to be fairly set and not rigged against us. So that's nice. That's nice.

Starting point is 01:03:42 It's a nice change. Ethereum stuff, layer two continues to get cheaper. What's this? Optimism, once again, reduces transaction fees by about another 30 to 40%. I mean, when do you keep on doing this for like seven times in a row, like things start to approach zero really, really fast.

Starting point is 01:04:00 So, as of recently, like, the last time this happened was like on March 3rd, and what is it today? March 9th. So on March 3rd, it called out got compressed by 40%, and then we're doing it again by another 40%. Like, fees are approaching zero, which is kind of unfortunate because now the gas fees on the Ethereum L1 are also approaching zero. Like, it starts to matter less. But hey, at least when the bull market finally rolls around again, layer two fees will actually be like, close to zero. It's kind of like the bankless podcast is just like a repeating cycle of us being sad about gas fees too high and then us being sad about gas fees too low. And we're in the part

Starting point is 01:04:38 where we're sad about gas fees too low. But it's awesome for the long term. Honestly, this is exactly where we need to see the market going. Ave's on optimism too. That's happening. Albe contracts employed on optimism. Yeah. Contracts deployed on optimism. So guys, layer two does not stop getting built out. NFT, NFT side of things. Let's start with this story. You said there was some shenanigans.

Starting point is 01:05:01 Okay, tell us about the shenanigans. Tell us what's here. What's here? Ty Lopez, who I don't know who he is other than an influencer, has released his own NFTs. I think very, very, very inspired by Gary Vee. Gary Vee, he mentioned these NFTs that were

Starting point is 01:05:16 redeemable, right? Like one of them was redeemable for like a gift box and another one was redeemable for a phone call with Gary Vee and another one was redeemable for whatever. And his community just loved it. Like big success. Everyone loved it.

Starting point is 01:05:28 He executed well. He executed beautifully. Ty Lopez is taking a similar approach as in like redeemable NFTs. But these ones are egregious. These are ridiculous. Kind of cringy. Oh, these are terrible. Okay, so let's go through some of these.

Starting point is 01:05:42 I think the most, okay, I'll save the most hilarious one for last. One-on-one Michelin Star Restaurant with Tai Lopez. Like, I'm sure that's a very, like, for the right price, that would be use interesting for the right fan. But it's being sold for 29 and a half Eth. I don't even know what that is in dollar terms because I think in Eth terms, but 30 Eth times, where are we? $200 at Eith price or 2000?

Starting point is 01:06:06 2000. Don't say 200. That was a bare market joke. Scary. That's like this $80,000 for a one-on-one Michelin-Star restaurant with Thai. You're allowed to pay $80,000 to take Ty Lopez out to a Michelin-Star restaurant.

Starting point is 01:06:22 One-on-one WhatsApp access to Ty's personal phone number. He's basically selling his phone number for 32.8-Eth. That's a whole entire Ethereum validator for Ty Lopez's number. You'll tie you up? Like, what are you going to do with that? Like, what are you going to... He doesn't even guarantee that he'll respond. One-on-one, watch a movie with Ty Lopez for 13th.

Starting point is 01:06:48 You can't even talk to the guy. You just got to shut up and watch the movie. Just watch a movie with him? Is you going to have popcorn? Like, wait, is that in person? I hope it's like on his couch or something. You guys are on Zoom and you guys press play at the same time. It's 13, eth please.

Starting point is 01:07:01 Okay, here's my favorite one. A one-on-one $10,000 game of horse with Ty Lopez. For the low, low price of 20 ether, you can have the ability to play a game of horse with Ty Lopez. And if you win, you get $10,000, which is like one-fifth, the cost of what it costs to buy one of these things. $50,000 for a game of horse with Ty. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:30 Wow. Better make that last. Wait, if you lose the game of horse, do you have to pay another $10,000? I hope, like, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:07:38 This is, do you think that maybe we just don't get it because we're not part of the community and this is just laughable, but Ty has some super fans that to him, he's just kind of like a, I don't know, like a Taylor Swift or a Kanye West

Starting point is 01:07:51 or like, someone actually worth this kind of, you know, experience price? You think we're the people who don't get it? You think there's people in the community want this? Yeah. Are we the blank holes? No, we're not. No, there's no way.

Starting point is 01:08:08 You know, it's mostly eth, too. Why would you spend your Eth this way, guys? God damn. Yo, the merch is happening. People spending, like, 20th on a game of horse, do they know how much this is going to be worth? Most merge, David? God, this is going to be one of the most financially terrible investments ever made by a lot.

Starting point is 01:08:27 I hope people, well, apparently people are actually buying these things. And because you can actually see it on chain. How many of are actually being bought? I don't know. But, yeah, either way, ridiculous. Wow, it's crazy. Do you think this gives NFTs a bad name, this kind of thing? Because this is what makes headlines, right?

Starting point is 01:08:47 Bigley. Bigley, yeah. It's kind of a joke. It just got onto my radar just because somebody tweeted this. out. It was like, oh, this is clearly the end of NFTs. Like, Tyro Lopez is ruining it for everyone. Like, honestly, like, here's Bear David coming out. This feels like the last gasps of ICOs in 2018.

Starting point is 01:09:04 The ICO mania was in 2017 when they all worked out. The ICOMania continued for another year while they got more and more ridiculous and more and more egregious and just more and more cringe. And, like, this is that to me, where, like, that was the ICOs, this is NFTs. This is, like, the cringiest NFT thing I've ever seen. Really? Was it worse than whatever we talked about last week with those mutant NFTs?

Starting point is 01:09:29 What's his name? You're right. Yeah, Kevin and Pixelmon's. Yeah, pixel mon's. Okay, good point. You have to make me consider that, Ryan, but I'll make you consider that this happened two weeks in a row. What's happening next week? Oh, God, I don't even want to know.

Starting point is 01:09:45 All right. Well, speaking of cringe, David, former file sharing site, LimeWire, is getting ready to relaunch as an NFT marketplace. Don't tell me this is another top signal. Remember line wire back in the day? Do you ever use line wire? I used line wire so much. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:01 It was great. It was great. It was coming back. How would you like it as an NFT platform? What the hell? What the hell? The absolute hell. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:10 I mean, you can't reuse it yet. You can join the wait list or say that you're a creator. I mean, they got to just be rotating the brand into an NFT marketplace platform. Because NFTs are hot. That's why. But again, a little late guys. You have to wait for the NFT markets to come back. Well, we'll see what happens there.

Starting point is 01:10:33 Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised. I doubt it. I doubt it. Andre. Cronier, he is a defy builder and kind of a famous defy builder. We had him on the podcast in 2020, I believe. It's the last time we had him in the podcast. It's like April 2020.

Starting point is 01:10:49 Yeah, the launch of WIRE and Wi-I-Fi and his whole strategy and a really interesting developer. He's gone on since then to build a lot of things. He's had his hand in a ton of different D-5 projects. And even like side chain, alt-layer-1 networks like Phantom, well, he just quit. It sounds like almost like a rage quit, maybe, although there's not much communication as to what type of departure this was because he, like, deleted his Twitter account and everything. and announced through, I guess maybe a business partner of some sort, that he's terminating his work on all of the apps and service. There are 25 of them that he had formerly worked on.

Starting point is 01:11:32 What's this about? I think I'll actually zoom all the way back out just to provide context to this. When Andre came on our podcast, this was right after Yerne got kicked off, which Yerne stole the show in DFI for like two weeks. people couldn't stop talking about it. And so that's kind of where Andre, like, rose up in fame just because he built this product and this token that he gave away for free and didn't really collect any of himself, went from zero to $60,000 in like four weeks or something.

Starting point is 01:12:00 And so that's when, like, the brand of Andre came around. But he came onto our podcast, like, in kind of a storm talking about, like, how, like, he basically bought a bit, didn't realize what he was going to turn himself into, like, DMs. Like when, like the, it's too much. It was too much. It was too much attention, like too much DGens. People like now asking Andre to pump the price, him being way too responsible for things. And that was like almost, that was over two years ago.

Starting point is 01:12:29 Wow. It's crazy that that's been that long. Anyways, Andre has since then built other stuff, which got him even more clout and put even more pressure on him as an individual. And that kind of continued. He started building on Phantom, building more products, just kind of, leading the charge of like the D-Gen side of crypto people aping into Andre contracts. Like Andre kind of turned into a meme. And then he was also tangentially involved with the whole Wonderland Danny Sesta,

Starting point is 01:12:57 Xerox, Sifu drama. And I think that's kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. And actually why I think we see Andre having quit because like he just didn't. Just burnt out? He just burnt out. He, after the whole Xeroxifu Quadringa Wonderland Danny Sessa drama, He wrote this tweet saying, like, I don't support Danny's actions. I just want to build.

Starting point is 01:13:19 I don't want any of this drama. I just want to build stuff. And so I think after, like, slogging through the mess of crypto Twitter and Digen Twitter and DG crypto life for two years, he finally just called it quits. It's like, I've had enough of this. Which he's not the only person I've seen do that in the last, like, month or so. Another reason why Dave is in bear market mode. But, yeah, so I think he's just kind of done with dealing with.

Starting point is 01:13:44 all the toxic DeFi community, which he's kind of gathered around himself accidentally. But yeah, the end of an era, I don't think he'll ever really be gone. Maybe he spun up an alt, a private alt that we don't know who it is so he can still participate. But the persona of Andre is being sunsetted, at least for now. I do hate to see DeFi builders go. But one thing that I am actually a little bit relieved to see is I feel like we were getting into an unhealthy position with respect to some of these DFI builders in the cult of personality

Starting point is 01:14:18 around them. Like Danny Sesta was a fantastic example. And I think something similar was also happening to Andre, where people just ape into these projects, you know, just because these DFI builders' names were associated with them. And then it almost seemed to get to a healthy place, not necessarily with Andre. I'm not too sure. But I was getting vibes that some of the builders of these projects were like pumping their own projects in unsustainable ways as well. And if not them themselves, like kind of the crowd

Starting point is 01:14:47 that gathered around them. And it just seemed really unhealthy and unsustainable for the space. And so I guess my take is this. Is personality cult defy dead? I kind of hope it is. And maybe Andre as well hopes it is. I don't know. Maybe some of the other defy builders in the space who just want to code as they say they want to do are, are happy. with kind of personality cult defy sunsetsting a little bit. And I do hope it's the end of it, at least for a season. This always returns, though. Like when there's success, when there's like bull market, fervor.

Starting point is 01:15:24 When number goes up, yeah. When number goes up, we see this every single time, right? And again, like tourists, we talked about tourists in crypto and the settlers, right? And I guess if you're a settler, you kind of get tired of seeing the same thing every cycle. But it does feel like the end of maybe a, a local cycle here of personality cult defy and honestly david i think that's kind of a healthy thing maybe it's a maybe it's a be market thing but it's a healthy thing i i tweeted out uh earlier this week i still never found out who danny sessa was uh which is like a joke because like that's how

Starting point is 01:16:00 started the whole like frog drama with us yeah and like what kind of replies did you get on that one completely modest normal people with an absence of frogs no way the frogs are gone from crypto Twitter. Like, there are no frauds. If you said that six weeks, well, you did say that six weeks ago. And I got absolutely hounded by the cult of personality. Driven off of the internet almost. Yeah, I had to like fucking take a personal day and just relax and have an IPA.

Starting point is 01:16:26 And like, now I get to joke about Danny Sessa because the tourists are gone and your boy's still here. And you always will be. Look, man, we invited Danny on the podcast and he said he would come on. Multiple times. He said he'd come on multiple times and probably. private, like, DMs. He said it publicly. Never came on. We never got to find out who he was. Bankless listeners are ever confused as who the settlers are. You're listening to them right now.

Starting point is 01:16:53 We're not, we're not leaving, okay? I'm not leaving. This is Leo DiCaprio, me. It's the bear market. I'm still here. You know what? I'm excited to do bankless. If this is a B-market, David, I'm excited to do B-market season with that's kind of what I'm getting into. That's the mood I'm trying to invoke. There are plenty of good reasons to be stoked about a bear market. A B market? Goldman Sachs is connecting clients to Galaxy Digital's ETH Fund.

Starting point is 01:17:21 I just think this means Goldman Sachs is a headline. Goldman Sachs has a bunch of clients, of course, with a lot of money, and they want an easy onboard to Ethereum. So they are onboarding to Galaxy Digital's Ether Fund, probably getting commission on that as Wall Street likes to do. Basically just a finder's fee for funneling people into Galaxy Digital's Youth Fund. I don't hate it. Fine.

Starting point is 01:17:45 Whatever. More people in crypto. Goldman Saches and worst things. This is a little bit of drama. Yeah. You know, let's talk about what this drama is. So Laura Shin released a book that you have. I'm not sure if you've read it yet, David.

Starting point is 01:17:59 That's a pretty thick book. No. But we've seen a lot of, like a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the Dow hacker identity reveal. There's some other things, Laura Shin, uncovered and revealed in this book. Why don't you talk about this spat between Charles Hoskinson and Laura Shin on Twitter? Yeah, so this got started off by somebody tweeting out, reading Laura Shin's book, it's great to discover Charles' early years portrayed on there, hashtag crypto.

Starting point is 01:18:24 And then Charles responds, A great work of fiction. Tough market to beat George R.R. Martin and Tolkien, but we wish her well, basically saying that everything in Lorishin's book is a fabrication fantasy. And so Laurishin comes in, taking the opportunity to probably promote her book, says, Hi, Charles. Speaking of fiction, do you want to address the discrepancies between your claims of dropping out of a PhD program

Starting point is 01:18:47 and the school's assertations that you were enrolled as an undergraduate? Whoa. Yeah. So Charles has said that he never got his PhD, but he was a PhD student for his while before he dropped out probably to go do cryptocurrency stuff. And then the school allegedly never even had the PhD program that Charles claims that he was part of. And, and, you know, so that's one thing. Like a lot of people, a lot of deep Ethereum people will kind of know Charles as like a, what's the word for a chronic liar? He's a chronic liar

Starting point is 01:19:16 of sorts. But then, who had a really good take? It was, it was, Eric Wall had a really good take that was retweeting Laura Shin's comments and said something that I think we're all thinking. And Eric Wall says, if you think about a person who so easily fabricates the truth about what such a simple thing as being a PhD student, not even having a PhD, but being once a PhD student is what he lied about? Don't you think that maybe? Just maybe the claimed technical impressiveness of Cardano is just a tad bit exaggerated. I think this is a great microcosm of my concerns about the Cardano ecosystem at large. It's kind of a cult of personality, as we were just discussing, project around Charles Hoskinson, who appears to be a chronic liar. And that, Ryan, is my spicy takes for the week.

Starting point is 01:20:05 There you go. You get one per week and one spicy take in for week. That was it. Do you know, is this the part of the market cycle where we like call out people who have been maybe deceptive? Yes. Like when price goes down, everyone's like, oh. The witch hunt part of the market cycle.

Starting point is 01:20:20 We see, again, it's classic. We already saw it. We saw it in 2008 as well. And it seems like these cult of personalities are, they can't persist during, during bare market cycles, at least not the same way they have during bull market cycle. So that's another turning of the wheel, I suppose. More indication that it's B season. There was also an ENS vote that ended Sunday, David. Can you talk a little bit about that and the interesting graph accompanying it? Yeah, this is, I think, coming to closure with a lot of the

Starting point is 01:20:52 ENS drama that was happened about a month ago, basically to speed run that drama, one of the founders of ENS, Brantley, very Catholic, tweeted anti-homo sexual things, anti-LGBQ things. got onto a Twitter spaces, did not back down from it, caused a bunch of drama in the crypto-twitter sphere, and then there was a movement to remove Brantley as a delegate towards ENS. And E&S, it's a DAO with delegate governance. And what we are looking at is the vote as to whether we should remove Brantley from the ENSDAO delegation.

Starting point is 01:21:27 And really, that's the backstory. But really what we want to talk about here is it's actually really cool to see the transparent nature of how and which delegates voted for what and how big they are. And so you get to see all of the delegates for ENS and how they voted. So it's basically like representative democracy and you get to see your representative. And so you as an ENS holder, you could vote for however you see fit if you want to individually vote directly. Or you could just like delegate your ENS to a delegate, such as coinbase.eath. Coinbase is a delegate.

Starting point is 01:22:00 it. Rainbowwall. Dot, Heath is a delegate. Nick. Nick Johnson. Griff. Keith, which is Griff Green, I'm pretty sure. Samona. Dot Eth, which is Simona Pop.

Starting point is 01:22:07 You get to see how your delegates voted, and you also get to see the weight on which they voted with, which is how much delegate weight that they have behind it. So as of the end of this vote, Brantley was the against side one, which was tipped over by Brantley himself, which is something to consider, which will actually retain Brantley as part of the ENS delegate.

Starting point is 01:22:30 system. But the point is the transparency. Yeah, the transparency and I guess governance system in action, particularly delegated governance. And this reminds me of, you said representative democracy, also reminds me of sort of corporate proxy vote, basically, because everything's weighted by allocation of capital and how much capital you have and you're delegating to you. But this is a Dow coming to a decision on something and all of the delegates weighing in. So I think it's healthy from that perspective and a good thing for governance to see. I just love the transparent breakdown as well. All right, David, takes time. You ready to talk about the takes of the week? Let's do it. All right, we will do it in

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Starting point is 01:25:45 What's the take, David? I saw somebody tweeted out, NFTs, the quickest way to annoy everyone in your life, which is a funny joke. But this is exactly what they said about blockchain. back in 2018. At the end of the ICO mania, after everyone was just done hearing about crypto and ICOs and decentralization, people were like, blockchain,

Starting point is 01:26:06 it's the newest way to annoy your families, the newest way to indicate that you're a virgin. Like, the word blockchain was just like not in vogue in 2018. And, you know, we just heard that all the way down. Like blockchain, super annoying. And now I just saw this tweet. It's the quickest way to annoy everyone in your life. And I'm like, hmm, I've heard this before.

Starting point is 01:26:26 And so I'm just reminding people that this is what people said at the end of the ICO mania, which is a little bit of, again, a bear market hat, but also pointing to the fundamentals that everyone that talked about how blockchain was annoying probably forgot to buy stuff during the bear market and forgot to make life-changing money in the next coming bull market. So take note. David is saying there is some market opportunity coming your way, some buying opportunity coming your way. What's this take?

Starting point is 01:26:55 Maybe I'll read it. This is a, the parent tweet was from somebody who said, three arrows capital holds AVAX. It's Avalanche token. Jump holds Terra. Sam, that's SBF from FTX, holds Solana. Sequoia holds Polygon, Paradigm holds Cosmos, institutions hold near. Sailor holds Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:27:15 Only Tetranode holds ETH. Laugh out loud. And you are thinking ETH will go to 20K during proof of stake, kind of making fun of the fact. that no big institutions, no VCs, no brands, no mega whales, none of the like big money is an advocate for ETH. They all hold these alternative coins. D.C. investor tweets on top of this and says, they may not know it and they may not have meant it this way, but this is exactly the ETH bullish thesis. Run it back, December 2018 style. Look, somebody else recalling the bear market, 2018 style. What is

Starting point is 01:27:55 DC saying in this parent tweet. Yeah, so he's saying, this parent tweet, the Shishy whoever says, like all these funds hold all these tokens and they're not ETH. So why would you ever think that ETH is going to run? D.C. is saying like, yes, they don't hold Eith. That means that they still have to buy it because they don't have any of it. And so all of the size of these funds, when Eith goes to the merge and people realize that fundamentals matter and all these other chains or just speculation against what they hope could potentially be an Ethereum killer once they realize it's not, they all have to hold Eith. Am I actually going to go even further on this?

Starting point is 01:28:32 Not only are they not holding Eith, but these are this parent tweet, which they thought was a dunk on ETH, it's actually the complete inverse, it's actually a dunk on all the other tokens. Do you want three arrows capital to be holding your token as we go into a bear market? Because then that means they're just going to dump it. So I would be very nervous as an avalanche holder that three arrows, capital holds is bag holding a bunch of AVAX tokens. And basically this tweet is just listing off all of the institutions that are probably a little bit underwater to some degree with all of their

Starting point is 01:29:04 investments. And so if you have investments and we're going into a down market, you're going to sell them. Like you're not, you may, I mean, maybe they're going to buy more, but like you don't want, in my opinion, three hours capital to be holding your asset of choice during times of bearishness. Oh my God, definitely not. They are going to dump on you. They are not settlers, okay? These are traders. These are mercenaries.

Starting point is 01:29:29 They are going to do whatever is in the financial best interest. Obviously, they're not going to hold through a brutal bare winter. They're going to switch over to USDC or stable coins or maybe Bitcoin and Eith in a bear market. Definitely not the holders of last resort that I would want on my team during the bear market. And DC recalled December 2018. this is sort of what happened in December 18. Like, if this is a B market, I'm not saying it is. If it is a B market, though, everything's going to dump,

Starting point is 01:30:00 but some things are going to mega dump. Like dump harder than you can even imagine. Do you remember some assets went down 99%? Most never recovered. Okay, so like what are you holding? Good time to take an objective look at your portfolio and see what other people are holding. What holding camp do you want to be in?

Starting point is 01:30:20 is the question if this is a B market. Okay, Lynn Alden had a take two. The difference between assets that are somebody else's liability and assets that are nobody's liability probably got a lot clear to people in recent weeks. What's Lynn saying here? Yeah, so there's assets like debt or assets that are conditional on the actions of somebody else

Starting point is 01:30:40 for them to be realized. And then there's assets like Bitcoin or Ether or Gold that are no one's liability. If you have it, you have it. And you have a lot more security in these assets. And during times of insecurity, during times of chaos, during times of war, having assets that are no one's liability

Starting point is 01:30:54 is really, really useful. During times of sanction as well. You definitely want those. See what the real assets are, what the bearer instruments are. What's this take from Nick Carter? He wrote an article, and this is a quote from it. Could you read it out?

Starting point is 01:31:09 Yeah, Nick Carter says, while seizing Afghan or Russian reserves may feel righteous and just, the immediate effect of such actions is to completely undermine the credibility of dollar debt as an international savings device. more or less saying, hey, do you store your value in dollars because you think the dollars are a safe haven? Well, we can also just rugpole you because of how you save them in dollars.

Starting point is 01:31:30 This is an asset that is somebody else's liability. If you hold dollars, you are, maybe it's a good store of value because you trust the federal government more than any other federal or federal reserve out there. But they can also freeze your money. And so, any time we sanction people, regardless of whether you consider these sanctions to be good sanctions, it's undermining the value of dollars because they can be snagged from you. Yeah, exactly. And I think what Nick is saying here is just let's all just acknowledge the tradeoff here. It might still be the right thing to do.

Starting point is 01:32:02 It might still be the thing you want to do, the thing you feel like you should do. But let's acknowledge the tradeoff is the U.S.'s reserve currency status. Because what are other countries going to want to hold now that they realize the Western financial apparatus can just like freeze their dollars on a whim? Is it going to be dollars? Is it going to be USDC? Or are they going to look to alternatives? And I think the answer is pretty obvious. They're going to look to alternatives.

Starting point is 01:32:26 So cause and effect, right? There is going to be a reaction to this sort of thing. There's no free lunch in the sanctions world. Yeah, that's exactly right. All right. So let's get to this, David. What are you excited about this week? I mean, listeners already know.

Starting point is 01:32:41 Like, I don't see a lot to be excited about. What? I mean, we can talk about the usual. we can talk about the merge, blah, blah, blah, blah. There was, at the beginning of this bull market, I put a line into a market Monday that stuck in my head where the bull markets are when society comes and they remember crypto's a thing

Starting point is 01:33:02 and then they reprice everything. And then some people stick around, but most people leave and then the bear market happens again. That's what I'm seeing. I'm seeing the attention leaving the space, people caring less about NFTs. These JPEGs are no longer interesting. They're just JPEGs now.

Starting point is 01:33:16 DeFi tokens never really got traction again post-Defi summer. L-1, alternative L-1s are like falling through the floor. Meanwhile, like the only real attention that crypto has on it right now is with sanctions and regulation, which are not exciting. Like, crypto bull markets happen during exciting times. And like, what is there to be excited about? Like, I'm excited about the merge. I'm excited about layer twos.

Starting point is 01:33:43 But like, those things don't scale out in the same way that, that NFTs did with culture and like social dynamics. And so like I'm looking at their horizon being like, what left does the crypto industry have in its quiver? How many arrows does it have left in its cryptic quiver to get people excited about it? And I'm just not seeing very many. So do you think we're entering at the least like maybe a quiet, a quiet period? It's not a bearish period. It's definitely going to be another B, which is a building period of time. I was going to say that. Yeah, we're entering a quiet building period. Which, I mean, kind of are loosely synonymous with bear markets because it's easier to build during bear markets.

Starting point is 01:34:23 But, like, I just, I just see all of the same things that we saw post-2018, like, in the 2022 version. There you go, guys. That's David's take. Tune in next week to see whether we get Bull Market David back or whether it's going to be, not bearish, David, builder David. Or he's worth to. Orgyz price goes past, like, $3,000 and I'm just like, super, oh, I'm bullish again. Like, I was totally wrong. The super cycles, right.

Starting point is 01:34:46 Super cycle. All right, Ryan, what are you excited about? I'm excited about the executive order. Just because it's not super dumb. I thought it would be super dumb, like, to be honest. I thought that they would screw it up. It's reasonably measured. It's keeping America in the game.

Starting point is 01:35:02 And I care about that because, look, I live in the U.S. And I have hopes for the U.S. to preserve some, to reject state surveillance, to reject the half-assed authoritarianism that's been trending towards in recent years to do something that a lot of other countries around the world aren't doing. Look, I mean, the US shouldn't try to compete

Starting point is 01:35:25 with countries on authoritarianism. That's a bad path. It's never going to win. It's just not authoritarian enough to actually do a good job at it, right? So what is the path for the US? That's a hilarious take. I mean, it's true.

Starting point is 01:35:39 It's just like, you know it's just going to do a half-ass job. So why do that? Why not double down on your core competence? and the founding narrative of the country, which is like freedom, right? Like that's the true narrative that a lot of people in the U.S. can actually get behind. Strong property rights, freedom, civil liberties. These are the things that the Constitution embodied and the things I would argue that that made the U.S. actually a country worth living in and worth immigrating to.

Starting point is 01:36:06 And I think you can still preserve these things if it does things like embrace crypto technology. I just saw a glimmer of hope this week in the game. executive order that not the least that they were going to embrace it, but at least they weren't going to quash it all in one fell swoop. So that's what's exciting to me this week. And I never thought I'd be saying a executive order is an exciting thing for crypto. But hey, that's what we're working with during the B market. It's a anything we can get. It's a complete inversion right now. NFTs are lame. Defi's dead. But hey, regulation, super sick. Yeah, super sick regulation. All right, guys, that's it.

Starting point is 01:36:47 That's the take of the week. Let's get to the last thing, David, which is... So what's the meme of the week this week? The meme of the week is just watching the video of people watching the shell gas price. Just click upwards. $4.7 cents, $4.8. You can watch it go up in real time. How depressing is that?

Starting point is 01:37:03 People have their hands on their hips. Just like watching gas go up in price. That's crazy. It's sad. Yeah, gas prices are insane this week. But I don't know. Because it's a bear market. There you go.

Starting point is 01:37:17 Guys, sorry for all the B market top, but we got to say what's on our mind in the roll-ups. That's what we do every week. But of course, none of this has been financial advice. We don't know what type of B-market it is. That's for you to make the decision. But we do know that Bitcoin is risky, Eith is risky, defy is risky. We'm telling you all along, you could lose what you put in.

Starting point is 01:37:38 They're less risky in bear markets. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - ROLLUP: Biden’s Crypto Executive Order | Sanctions & Commodities | Coinbase & MetaMask | Bear Watch?!

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